Skeptics, Humanists Come Together in Tacoma in First Joint ConferenceSkepticism, Humanism, or Both?

It was billed as the CFI Summit—An International Congress in the Pacific Northwest, and it was a kind of experiment. “The time has come: humanists, skeptics, and other critical thinkers coming together to work together for a more rational world.” That was the meeting’s call to action, as the first joint conference of the Center for Inquiry and its affiliate organizations, the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (CSI, publisher of the Skeptical Inquirer) and the Council for Secular Humanism (CSH, publisher of Free Inquiry), convened in a stylish, modernist hotel in Tacoma, Washington, October 24–27, 2013. The conference thus included/subsumed what otherwise CSI would have called CSICon 3, following the first CSICon in New Orleans in 2011 and CSICon 2 in Nashville in 2012.

The weather outside was foggy, though the talk inside was anything but, as skeptic and humanist speakers explored all the areas in which their interests and passions overlap, and a few that some may (and others may not) wish to keep separate.

The opening plenary session, “Humanism, Skepticism, and Inquiry,” was a theme of much of the conference and the point of continuing discussion throughout. Is it about time the two major arms of the Center for Inquiry—skeptics with their love of science and evidence-based inquiry and humanists with their naturalistic philosophy and distrust of religious intrusions in public life—come together, at least once a year, in a conference like this? Or are there still good reasons that the two groups keep their own separate conferences?

If you drew two circles representing the interests and values of members of the two groups, they’d probably overlap by about two-thirds or three-fourths.
But the overlap isn’t total. Philosopher Paul Kurtz, who founded CSI and CSH, considered both organizations and their missions equally important. Yet while
he himself embraced all their values and goals in one over-arching personal philosophy, he, for various practical reasons, including the wishes of many
members, kept the two organizations and their conferences separate, with the later-created Center for Inquiry as mainly a logistical and administrative
connective.

Panelists in the opening session on “Humanism, Skepticism, and Inquiry” take questions. (Photo: Brian Engler)

Ronald A. Lindsay, now the CEO and president of all three organizations, opened the plenary session with an explication of what they all have in common: a
commitment to critical thinking and a conviction that beliefs should not outstrip the evidence. He suggested that there are no irreconcilable differences
between skepticism and humanism. “They are compatible. . . .We need to examine all things carefully and go where the evidence takes us. That unifies us.”

Ray Hyman and Daniel Loxton took a contrary view. Hyman, a founding Fellow of CSICOP (now CSI), said, “The real problem is the perception.” He referred to
a sometimes “uneasy tension” between the skeptics and humanists and an early concern in the organizations’ histories in which skeptics became upset at what
they considered “religion bashing” by some humanists and some humanists became upset at what they considered skeptics’ bashing of parapsychology. In
Hyman’s recollection this led to Kurtz’s determination to keep the two groups’ conferences separate. Hyman also noted that in the skeptic movement a lot of
people can be at least somewhat religious and still good scientific skeptics. “Skeptics are more inclusive by nature,” he said. “It’s probably not a good
idea to mix these two groups.”

Lindsay quickly emphasized—as did CFI Board Chairman Edward Tabash later in the conference—that CFI doesn’t “bash” religion but examines it. It emphasizes
that religion should not have a privileged place in society exempt from critical scrutiny.

Loxton, though, echoed Hyman’s theme. Loxton, editor of the Skeptic Society’s Junior Skeptic and author of several books (including some on
evolution), has become a kind of informal historian of the skeptic movement. He says he feels intimately connected to both traditions, skeptic and humanist
(he is both). Nevertheless, said Loxton, “I am a CSICOP-style skeptic” and noted that the creation of CSICOP filled a large gap in scholarship. “I care
about keeping scientific skepticism unencumbered and independent,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what we believe. The question is what we can demonstrate to
be so. Skepticism matters.”

Barry Kosmin, founding member of the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College (and a board member of all three
organizations) described what he calls “The Rising Secular-Skeptic Generation,” based on his national surveys of college students (the latest this summer
carried out in collaboration with CFI). The 2013 survey found that only 32 percent of college students self-describe themselves as religious. Twenty-eight
percent refer to themselves as secular (males more prominent in this group) and 32 percent as spiritual (females more prominent). His point is that “a
large constituency of millions of young people is emerging” favorable to the viewpoints of CFI.

Michael De Dora, director of CFI’s Office of Public Policy in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Brian Engler)

Michael De Dora, director of CFI’s Office of Public Policy in Washington, DC, said he thinks skeptics and humanists can work best together. They have
complementary values on many issues, he said. He agreed that CFI presents a bit of a challenge because it is a “mish-mash” of many things, but that can be
overcome.

Some other panelists, like Ophelia Benson (an author and Free Inquiry columnist) and Mark Hatcher (CFO of Black Atheists of America) expressed
impatience with the whole debate. Instead of emphasizing this internal issue, Hatcher urged focusing on a far bigger, external problem, endemic to both
groups: “We are terrible at communication.” He said both humanists and skeptics need to take a lesson from the churches. “Churches do things correctly as
far as communications. They have found the beat. They have found the rhythm and how the heart works. If you want people engaged, you’ve got to get your
finger on the beat. If we do, we have the advantage of actually having facts.”

Bill Cooke, director of CFI’s transnational programs, also spoke out with some impatience. In Kenya and Uganda, where he has worked on behalf of CFI,
“there are serious issues of life and death” that involve both parts of the organization, including the skeptic side, such as belief in witchcraft that
often leads to murders. “There this issue is irrelevant.”

The discussions continued a while longer in this way, all polite and civil. If any fireworks were expected, none were set off. By conference-end, it seemed
most everyone, skeptic or humanist, had learned a little bit about the other’s concerns, and in fact found that their issues tended to blend one in to
another in a more or less seamless way.

Zack Koplin, Young Education Activist

Zack Koplin is the amazingly dedicated and self-possessed college student from Rice University who as a high school student in Louisiana fought vigorously
against efforts to introduce creationist teachings into the schools. He gave an inspiring lecture about his fight for science in Louisiana, Texas, and
across the country.

“Louisiana has an addiction to creationism,” he said. The state’s Science Education Act “is so open-ended you can bring anything into it. . . . It’s not
about critical thinking. It’s really a creationism law.” Even Governor Bobby Jindal has said it’s about creationism, Koplin said. “It’s crystal clear this
is only about teaching creationism.”

In Texas, official reviewers of science textbooks include fellows of the creationist Discovery Institute and the Institute for Creation Research. “The
publishers have resisted so far,” said Koplin, but he wasn’t sure whether their resistance would continue to succeed.

The problem in both states is “backwards, antiscience legislators.” Louisiana passed a voucher system that takes money from the public schools and gives it
to creationist schools. He said $4 million of public money was taken away that way the first year.

“I want scientists who have been educated well,” Koplin concluded. As for the sometimes nasty attacks he has encountered from creationists, he has endured
them, “but sometimes you want to just go to sleep for a week.”

Bill Nye, “The Science Guy”

Bill Nye delivers the summit’s keynote talk. (Photo: Brian Engler)

At the evening banquet, conference attendees filled the round dinner tables. Looming at the back were four empty rows of folding chairs spanning the entire
width of the ballroom. A bad sign? No, as it turned out. As dinner ended and the time neared for Bill Nye’s keynote talk, suddenly the doors at the back
opened and in rushed an exuberant crowd of mostly local people, including a fair number of youngsters. The talk had been advertised on the sides of city
buses, and outside the banquet hall CFI sold tickets for just his talk. (He was still in a leg brace from his Dancing with the Stars appearances,
and it was now just a few days before his November 7 appearance on a typically witty episode of the CBS television comedy The Big Bang Theory
pitting Bill Nye “The Science Guy” against Bob Newhart as “Dr. Proton.”)

Nye’s was a rousing talk, roaming over how we determined the age of the Earth at 4.6 billion years (“Why then try to pretend the Earth is 10,000 years old?
Amazing!”), the makeup of the universe (“90 percent hydrogen, 8 percent helium, 2 percent ‘everything-

elsium’”), the fragility of the atmosphere, our spacecraft now soaring on beyond the edge of the solar system, and some of our external views of Earth from
distant space. All this led to a passionate advocacy for interest in science and science education. And that led in turn to Nye’s frequently repeated
mantra: “We can change the world!” By midway through his talk the audience was thoroughly with him. Their chants “We can change the world” reverberated
along with his.

Example: “If we can harness the energy of young people and get them passionate about science, it is reasonable to think that we can . . . change the
world!”

“It is with great joy and reverence and passion that I talk about the impact of science education.” He ended by showing the Cassini spacecraft’s new view
of Earth from beyond Saturn as a tiny dot barely visible in the distance far past Saturn’s rings, an outside-in view of the solar system that provides
sobering cosmic perspective. “We are a speck on a speck, orbiting a speck.” But by our experiencing “the passion and joy and beauty of science . . . we can
change the world!”

There followed an especially lively Q&A period. Most all the questions came from the newly arrived audience members, and two nearly moved Bill Nye to
tears by their stories of how he has inspired them to pursue a lifetime interest in science. Said one person: “You have been a major influence to me
personally. Thank you for being who you are.”

“I have tried to influence young people,” Nye said. “The scientific method is the best idea humans ever had.”

It should be easy to draw people in, he added, because science deals with some of humanity’s most profound questions. Among them: “Where did we come from?”
and “Are we alone?”

“We are made of stars,” he concluded. “If that doesn’t fill you with some sort of joy . . . I don’t believe it!”

Leonard Mlodinow and New Point of Inquiry Hosts

Josh Zepps interviews Leonard Mlodinow on a live edition of Point of Inquiry. (Photo: Brian Engler)

Physicist and writer Leonard Mlodinow (author of The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, winner of CSI’s 2008 Balles Prize
for critical thinking) gave a lecture presentation on the topic of his new book, Subliminal: How Your Mind Rules Your Behavior. He presented
recent research from cognitive psychology and the new field of social neuroscience about the automatic aspects of our consciousness, which happen without
our awareness or intention.

“Our perceptions, memories, and social judgments are all constructed by our unconscious, from limited data,” said Mlodinow. Even with just perception, it
is a process of construction. “Your retina sees things fuzzily and incomplete”—he showed examples from experiments. “Your brain sharpens and fills in. Your
unconscious mind does this for you, and it’s a great gift.”

This happens with hearing as well. He played the Led Zeppelin song “Stairway to Heaven” backward. You seem to hear “Satan” three times and also “666”—if
that is suggested to you. Similar things happen with all our other senses (experiments show how a light touch can create a sense of trust and even lead to
higher tips to waitresses). Memory is of course a reconstructive process as well. “Just like vision, your brain takes the gist of memory and reconstructs
it.”

He described how we all do what psychologists call motivated reasoning. “We look for data that supports what we want to believe.” This explains why people
can come to vastly different judgments even when the factual evidence before them is the same. “They’ve generally sincerely judged the evidence
differently—it’s unconscious.”

Laboratory tests show these processes in various ways. Experiments, for example, show that in elections, seventy percent of the candidates judged to be
“more competent looking” won.

At the end of that afternoon, Mlodinow was back on stage. The occasion this time was the first interview (and before a large live audience) with the new
cohosts of CFI’s weekly Point of Inquiry podcast, Josh Zepps and Lindsay Beyerstein. An Australian, Zepps joins the CFI podcast as a founding host
and producer at online talk network HuffPost Live, after hosting stints with Bloomberg TV, the Discovery Channel, and as anchor for CBS’s Peabody
Award–winning Channel One News. Zepps conducted the interview with Mlodinow, who got the chance to expand some about the fact that most of our thinking
comes from the unconscious and about motivated reasoning (“thinking like a lawyer, not a scientist.”)

The other cohost, Lindsay Beyerstein, is an investigative journalist and staff writer for In These Times. Longtime SI readers will remember her
late father, psychologist and CSI Fellow and Executive Council member Barry Beyerstein. She interviewed conference lunch speaker Katherine Stewart (author
of The Good News Club: The Christian Right’s Stealth Assault on America’s Children) on religious extremism and how the Christian right has managed
to gain so much influence actually operating in public schools. These two interviews are online at www.pointofinquiry.org.

]]>Three Days of Science and Skepticism in StockholmThu, 24 Apr 2014 10:25:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/three_days_of_science_and_skepticism_in_stockholm
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It awards the Nobel Prizes in science and proudly portrays not a political figure but one of its most eminent scientists, botanist Carl von Linné
(1707–1778), better known to the world as Linnaeus, the father of biological nomenclature, on its ubiquitous 100-kronor note (about $16). So it is hardly
surprising that Sweden is the home of a large and vibrant skeptics group and was the able host of the 2013 European Skeptics Congress, August 23–25, in
Stockholm.

The fifteenth in the series of biennial congresses created by the European Council of Skeptical Organizations (but first in Scandinavia), ESC 2013 featured
speakers from ten countries and plenty of time for socializing and networking. Martin Rundkvist, P.J. Råsmark, and Elisabeth Rachlew of the Swedish
Skeptics officiated and kept things running smoothly.

Most all the usual academic topics were covered, but there were also magicians and even Sweden’s first astronaut, PhD physicist and CERN Fellow Christer
Fuglesang of the European Space Agency, a veteran of two space missions to the International Space Station (including five spacewalks totaling nearly
thirty-two hours), in 2006 and 2009. He proudly noted he has been a member of the Swedish Skeptics almost from their beginning in the early 1980s. In his
lively presentation of phenomenal photos of Earth from space he included one of himself wearing an “Always Be Skeptical” T-shirt while peering down at
Earth from the station.

Physician and statistician Hans Rosling (Karolinska Institute) and his son Ala Rosling jolted attendees’ preconceptions from the start with their
“fact-based worldview with animated data.” Founders of the Gapminder Foundation, which develops the Trendalyzer software system for visualization of
statistics, they took the audience through rapid-fire animated displays of world demographic trends. Much of what we think we know about world population
trends is wrong, they told us, and then demonstrated, first using an instant electronic feedback system to take the audiences’ answers to a series of
questions and compare them with reality.

Today half of the world’s population is in Asia and Africa, but by the year 2100 that figure will leap to 80 percent. “CEOs know this better than
academics,” said Hans, a bow to the practical value of modern demographic knowledge.

A dramatic new reality has set in. Whereas couples used to have on average of six children of whom four died, the new balance is now two kids per couple,
with most of them surviving. This dramatic decline in babies born per woman is true of all religions and regions. Europe just started doing it earlier. As
a result, world population will continue rising but not at the steep rate predicted three or four decades ago.

Max Maven, the mentalist and illusionist, gave both a lecture where he praised some deception (“art is a beautiful deception”) and later a
two-hour evening performance. Even our audience of skeptics found ourselves repeatedly mystified (but with no implication of paranormality)—a good lesson
for everyone.

Kristine Hjustad (Norway), a medical student and PhD candidate (and also a performer of theatrical magic), performed knot-tying and other illusions to
demonstrate how we are fooled and how we interpret our perceptions, add meaning to them, and simplify them, usually without realizing it. “Our brain is in
control. It decides.”

Magician Tom Stone (Sweden) continued that theme. He showed and then patiently explained some of the psychological and perceptual principles behind
creating some illusions. “So now you won’t be fooled,” he added wryly. He then performed them once more, and fooled everyone again.

Neuroscientist Beatrice Mautino of Italy’s CICAP skeptics group emphasized the value of solving mysteries to learn science (and vice versa). She said
skeptical investigation can kill three birds at once when it not only solves a mystery but explains some scientific facts (like the physics of firewalking)
. . . and then goes on to tell something about how science works. Hands-on activities are especially productive. CICAP takes people out to make their own
crop circles (they start with thirty-meter-diameter circles) or test “the blood of San Januarius” or lie on a bed of nails. As for assertions about an
Apollo landing hoax, she and her colleagues go through the evidence for that, and then ask people to investigate and test the claims themselves. This seems
to be an effective strategy.

Shane Greenup (Australia) reinforced that theme. Instead of telling people they are wrong, he urges leading them to question the belief using the Internet
to find the right information. And that right information could come via his Rbutr.com software. You install Rbutr on your browser and it finds rebuttals
to extraordinary claims. Skeptics can establish a link from any web page making a claim to the rebuttals of their choice.

As journalistic organizations cut costs and staff, they do less real reporting. Michael “Marsh” Marshall (United Kingdom), who writes about the role of PR
in modern media, warned against a spreading practice he calls “churnalism”—printing press releases as news. A particularly popular new practice is
publishing what are essentially advertisements hidden as “research” based on online polls. Companies sponsor simple online polls, paying people to fill out
what he calls “B.S.” surveys filled with dodgy and leading questions and all calculated to lead to some favorable view about the particular business—say
preferences about travel or fashion. He has a “fourth paragraph rule”—if a company name appears around the fourth paragraph, there is a strong chance it
paid for the article. London’s tabloid Daily Mail, the biggest newspaper in Britain, is notorious for this, he said. It runs these paid surveys in
almost every issue, and “They’ll put out anything to get attention.”

Psychologist Tomasz Witkowski (Poland), familiar to our readers from several recent pieces in SI, gave a nuanced talk addressing the question of whether
the social sciences are what Richard Feynman called a “cargo cult science.” Witkowski has his criticisms of social science—too much of it deals with
unimportant topics and its surveys often use students and other biased samples. But he ultimately came down in defense of the social sciences, which he
said have great hidden potential. One example is the research that showed that adding a third brake light on the rear of vehicles would drastically reduce
accidents and injuries, or that emergency vehicles should be painted lime green to be most easily seen—practices, along with many advances in passenger
airline safety, that have now been widely adopted and save lives.

Dr. Catherine de Jong (Nether­lands), an anesthesiologist, addiction researcher, and president of the Dutch Society Against Quackery, described
pseudoscientific addiction treatments that contradict treatments based on science. These questionable treatments include the Prometa protocol, disulfiram
injections, and ibogaine. The latter is described as “a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in plants in West Africa,” and many wrongly infer
that since it is natural it is safe. Ibocaine carries a high risk of heart arrhythmias and death, and it has been forbidden in the USA. Some of these
addiction treatments claim FDA approval (but any approvals are not for addiction treatment) or “almost 100 percent success” or offer a dubious hypothesis
about the working mechanism. Good science, better cooperation among health authorities, and investigative journalism all can help get rid of such
pseudoscientific treatments.

Anna Bäsén gave many examples of such investigative journalism. A medical reporter for a leading Swedish daily newspaper, she specializes in undercover
health journalism, going undercover to nursing homes or alternative medical practitioners (such as a health coach who claimed you can cure deadly viruses
with positive thinking) or psychics (she got a cold reading of “one of my not-real dead relatives”) and then simply reporting what they say. Undercover
medical journalism shouldn’t be used recklessly, Bäsén says, but “I also get upset when people get ripped off.” Her published exposés have put some of
these people out of business.

Science teacher Dénis Caroti (France) described teaching about intellectual self-delusion in France (where the word zetetics rather than skepticism is used to avoid negative connotations of the latter). He touted physicist and CSI Fellow Henri Broch’s Laboratory of Zetetics at the
University of Nice, Sophia, where critical thinking is an official skill to be acquired by students.

On the final morning, Chris French (United Kingdom) gave a survey of anomalistic psychology (also the title of his new book), Hayley Stevens (United
Kingdom) described some of her experiences as a skeptical ghost hunter, and I ended the conference with a talk on “Why We Do This: The Higher Values of
Skeptical Inquiry” (published in the November/December 2013 Skeptical Inquirer).

There was more, a lot more, but you get the idea. For three days in Stockholm science and skepticism were the central theme of stimulating
intellectual discussion and exchange. Young skeptics were everywhere and lent vigor and freshness. And until there is a Nobel Prize in science-based
skepticism or a distinguished skeptic makes it onto some nation’s currency, that will just have to do.

]]>Why We Do This: Revisiting the Higher Values of Skeptical InquiryMon, 27 Jan 2014 12:25:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/why_we_do_this_revisiting_the_higher_values_of_skeptical_inquiry
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I want to give some brief historical perspective about the skeptical movement, take a look at some new trends, and revisit a theme I’ve emphasized before,
reminding ourselves why we do this: the higher values of skeptical inquiry.

Known somewhat affectionately throughout our first three decades as CSICOP, the Committee was founded on May 1, 1976, at a major conference on “The New
Irrationalisms” called by philosophy professor Paul Kurtz at the State University of New York at Buffalo. It was the first organized effort by scientists,
scholars, and investigators from all relevant fields of intellectual inquiry, worldwide, to unite in exploring and combatting credulous belief in
pseudoscientific and paranormal claims.

This, some of you may recall, was an era of rampant belief in astrology (“the Age of Aquarius”), Velikovsky and his planetary pinballs, von Däniken and
ancient astronauts, birthdate-based biorhythms, the supposed Bermuda Triangle, pyramid power, and copious other unexamined nonsense. Uri Geller was
everywhere bending cutlery and fooling even some physicists into thinking he had supernormal powers.

I covered that conference as editor of Science News magazine and the next year was invited to become editor of CSICOP’s journal, the Skeptical
Inquirer. It has been my honor to have been its editor ever since.

On our thirtieth anniversary in 2006, Paul Kurtz himself did a major retrospective review of the committee and the Skeptical Inquirer (SI,
September/October 2006). At the time of our founding, Kurtz recalled, “There was tremendous public fascination” with the paranormal and it was “heavily
promoted and sensationalized by an often irresponsible media.” (I leave it to you to decide whether those conditions now differ.) “Our interest,” Kurtz
stressed, “was not simply in the paranormal curiosity shop but to increase an understanding of how science works.”

We thus appealed to scientists and scholars to engage with the public not only in investigating popular claims that involved misunderstandings of science
but in explicating the higher values of science and critical inquiry.

That broad spectrum of interest and emphasis still typifies us and most of the skeptical movement today. We skeptics do it all, investigating the smallest
strange mysteries that fascinate the public while also explaining the powerful tools of science and reason and applying them to thinking about the broadest
issues of concern and confusion in today’s complex societies.

Just as science is internationalist and scientific principles know no boundaries, the misrepresentations of science that concern us observe no national
borders. It was fitting therefore that Paul Kurtz (who died a year ago, on October 20, 2012, at the age of eighty-six) always advanced an internationalist
perspective. Kurtz was an international ambassador for skepticism and humanism and free and open critical inquiry. He tirelessly traveled the world and
encouraged skeptics everywhere to organize their own groups. They did. In his retrospective he expressed “great satisfaction that the Skeptical Inquirer is
read throughout the world and that CSICOP has helped generate new skeptics groups, magazines, newsletters almost everywhere—from Australia and China to
Argentina, Peru, Mexico, and Nigeria; from Indian, Eastern Europe, and Russia to Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the United Kingdom, so that the Center
for Inquiry/Transnational (including CSICOP) has become truly planetary in scope.” More nations can now be added to that list. We can of course debate to
what degree this encouragement led to the flowering of new groups and to what degree they flowered on their own.

In his later years, Kurtz convinced himself—but few others—that interest in the paranormal had diminished. “No one is interested in the paranormal
anymore,” he would proclaim. We would either demur or just smile. What had happened, I think, was twofold: First, his interest in the paranormal and
pseudoscience had diminished, and he was now devoting most of his energy to bringing his profound vision of a positive, affirmative secular humanism
informed by the findings of science to broader arenas of public—or as he put it, planetary—relevance. In a way, I sympathized with him; many of our
academic colleagues blanched at even a semantic connection to anything paranormal—I didn’t like it much myself. In fact in September 2006 we on the CSICOP
Executive Council took “paranormal” out of the name and mission statement of our Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal,
shortening the name to just Committee for Skeptical Inquiry—and unfortunately almost losing the acronym, and brand, CSICOP.

But second, the rise of the Internet and the proliferation of new cable and satellite television channels by the hundreds brought an insatiable demand for
new programming with mass appeal. Paranormal themes eagerly helped fill the need. Paranormal programming wasn’t visible in quite the same classic way via
books and newspapers and network TV that worried us before; it appeared now on smaller stages, but the stages had multiplied geometrically. Nowadays you
can’t channel hop without encountering ridiculous pseudoscientific shows touting haunted houses and ghost-hunting, searching for monsters,
mystery-mongering about supposed aliens and UFOs, or showing so-called psychics pretending to find missing persons or communicate with the dead. It’d be
amusing if it wasn’t so sad. Interest in the paranormal hasn’t diminished at all. It just fragmented and proliferated. It is everywhere.

So psychics, UFOs, monsters, and their ilk continue to pop up like the unsinkable rubber ducks they are. But there have been some new themes since we
began. Back then, “alternative and complementary medicine” didn’t even exist, at least not as a respectable-sounding term. We called it quackery or snake
oil. Or bad medicine. Now it has become all polite and gentrified, and our medical schools and research institutes, funded publicly, give nods of obeisance
to it, providing undeserved respectability.

Let’s at least adopt our colleague Dr. Harriet Hall’s term “So-Called Alternative and Complementary Medicine” with its acronym “SCAM” or just follow the
clear advice of Dr. Paul Offit, in his fine new book Do You Believe in Magic? : “The truth is, there is no such thing as conventional or
alternative or complementary or integrative or holistic medicine. There’s only medicine that works and medicine that doesn’t.”

But this “medicine that doesn’t work” has become an enormous industry that requires continuing critical examination. Thankfully many physicians have become
active in the skeptical community, even leaders (many of them associated with CSI), and their barrages of critiques are now putting some needed skeptical
balance and perspective on the matter.

Another new theme: conspiracy theories. Conspiracy thinking has always been around but not in the endemic way in which it now pollutes almost every aspect
of public discourse. Conspiracies about what? Just about everything.

Distrust in government and all public institutions is at high levels, not without some reason, but conspiratorial thinking is not just due to
that. It is a way of not thinking. It is a pernicious way of shaping a preconceived personal worldview so that it is immune from criticism. Absence of
evidence for the theory is perceived as evidence of the conspiracy (to withhold the evidence). That is not critical thinking. That is the opposite
of critical thinking. (And yes, we all know there are real conspiracies in the world; critical thinking is required to separate them from imagined ones.)

The new challenge to scientific skepticism I found most surprising was opposition to climate science. Climate scientists’ findings that the Earth is
warming and that that this warming is likely to continue for the foreseeable future due to the steady increase of greenhouse gases seems to most of us
straightforward science. But, as you know, the conclusions have engendered passionate opposition, even denial in some quarters. Because of this gap between
scientific evidence and public perception, we’ve been involved with this topic in the Skeptical Inquirer since 2007. This topic differs from the others
because a few of our fellow skeptics are among the critics of climate science. No science is perfect, especially a young science like climatology, but its
findings are far more robust than its critics want to admit. We have tried to be respectful of those skeptic colleagues who honestly question the findings
of climate science; they think, I am sure, that they are being good skeptics. (In this case I’d prefer to call them contrarians.) But I believe they are
seeing the science through their own ideological filters. . . and that can be dangerous. Especially so when in so many nonscientific forums they seem to
trust the science is being denigrated and distorted and opposition to it is being encouraged by some of the same powerful political propaganda machines
that have supported the tobacco lobby in the past and continue to fund creationists today.

Another new strand is apocalyptic thinking. Whether global contagions, environmental collapse, collisions with nonexistent rogue planets, alien invasions,
or zombies, something ends our world and civilization. Perhaps this is a subset of conspiracy thinking. In any event it is endemic in our popular culture
at the moment, and I worry, just a bit anyway, about the effect on young people growing up with the idea, formerly confined mostly to religious zealots,
that the world has no future.

So those are some new current strands to go along with the old, perennial ones that constantly crop up using new terms and new disguises, as when
“Intelligent Design” tried (ultimately unsuccessfully) to replace old-fashioned creationism or “anomalous cognition” was proffered for claims of psychic
powers.

But again, our interest has never been just debunking the paranormal or exposing the delusions of its promoters and followers. Instead it is to encourage
an appreciation for the scientific outlook, with its innate initial open-minded skepticism toward new claims to knowledge, its creative tools for teasing
out the truths about nature, and its reliance on high-quality evidence and informed peer criticism in assessing the results.

Some of these larger topics and issues, as I wrote when announcing our new Committee for Skeptical Inquiry name (SI, January/February 2007), include:

…how our beliefs in such things arise, how our minds work to deceive us, how we think, how our critical thinking capabilities can be improved, what are the
answers to certain uninvestigated mysteries, what damage is caused by uncritical acceptance of untested claims, how critical attitudes and scientific
thinking can be better taught, how good science can be encouraged and bad science exposed, and on and on.

As for SI and CSI, Kurtz always encouraged these efforts to broaden our scope and apply the tools of scientific inquiry to newly emerging issues where
there is public confusion and where the tools of evidence-based skepticism and critical thinking can be of service. As he said, “We originally criticized
pseudoscientific, paranormal claims because we thought that they trivialized and distorted the meaning of genuine science.” (That was my concern as well.)
But, he continued, “Many of the attacks on the integrity and independence of science today come from powerful political-theological-moral doctrines.”

Likewise, as I have written in a Skeptical Inquirer essay, “In Defense of the Higher Values” (July/August 2006), the new areas we are concerned about
“arise from deep-seated ideologies. They arise from a dangerous capturing of mainstream, liberal, open-minded religious viewpoints by those with far more
extreme, narrow, rigid, authoritarian religious viewpoints. They arise from a devoted determination to impose those viewpoints on everyone else.” (Both
Kurtz’s SI essay I’ve been referring to and mine are reprinted in our latest SI anthology, Science Under Siege, Prometheus Books 2009.)

These attacks are on the open-minded tolerance of others different from oneself; on education and the love of learning and the quest for new knowledge; on
a free and open society’s distrust of dogma and authority; on freedom of expression and a clear separation of church and state; on the basic rights of
women to make their own choices; and on a deep appreciation of education as a progressive force for enlightenment and improvement.

So what we science-minded skeptics are defending here goes way beyond any of the specific bizarre ideas, trumped-up mysteries, or misperceptions or
misrepresentations of the real world we may critique. What we are defending, I have written before and I reiterate here, are hard-won concepts essential to
a free and open society—if that society is to have well-informed citizens capable of making wise decisions in a complex technological world. Among them:

• Reason and rationality.

• Respect for the scientific outlook.

• The skeptical attitude, a key component of scientific thinking, with its obligations to put all new assertions to tests of empirical evidence.

• The traditions of learning—real learning, deep and broad, and unfettered.

• The deepest traditions of democracy—valuing individual freedom, human dignity and rights, and treasuring the free and open interplay of ideas.

So when we get tired, or discouraged, take heart that our travail has purpose and meaning. And we can draw inspiration from others facing challenges far
beyond ours. Consider the courageous example of Malala Yousafzai. Malala is the sixteen-year-old Pakistani girl who was shot in the head last year by the
Taliban for advocating the education of girls.

At the United Nations in July, Malala said she is not against anyone, she is for “the education of girls and boys, especially the children of the
Taliban.”

“The extremists are afraid of books and pens,” she said. “The power of education frightens them. . . .The power of the voice of women frightens them. . . .
Let us wage a global struggle against illiteracy, poverty, and terrorism and let us pick up our books and pens. They are our most powerful weapons.”

I am not suggesting that skeptics plunge into these kinds of life-and-death situations. (Some do, like Malala, and have paid a big price, witness the August 20 murder of Indian rationalist and skeptic Dr. Naredra Dabholkar.) My point is that skepticism, and its advocacy of learning and critical thought, exists along a continuum that includes crucially meaningful matters.

If this sixteen-year-old can endure and enlighten and inspire on the world stage, we can forge ahead with our modest efforts to bring a modicum of reason
and rationality to a modern world still fighting ancient strands of ignorance and intolerance.

It awards the Nobel Prizes in science and proudly portrays not a political figure but one of its most eminent scientists, botanist Carl von Linné
(1707–1778), better known to the world as Linnaeus, the father of biological nomenclature, on its ubiquitous 100-kronor note (about $16). So it is hardly
surprising that Sweden is the home of a large and vibrant skeptics group and was the able host of the 2013 European Skeptics Congress (ESC), August 23–25,
in Stockholm.

The fifteenth in the series of biennial congresses created by the European Council of Skeptical Organizations (but first in Scandinavia), ESC 2013 featured
speakers from ten countries and plenty of time for socializing and networking. Martin Rundkvist and P.J. Råsmark of the Swedish Skeptics officiated and
kept things running smoothly.

Most all the usual academic topics were covered, but there were also magicians and even Sweden’s first astronaut, PhD physicist and CERN Fellow Christer
Fuglesang of the European Space Agency, a veteran of two space missions to the International Space Station (including five spacewalks totaling nearly
thirty-two hours), in 2006 and 2009. He proudly noted he has been a member of the Swedish Skeptics almost from their beginning, in the early 1980s. In his
lively presentation of phenomenal photos of Earth from space he included one of himself wearing an “Always Be Skeptical” T-shirt while peering down at
Earth from the International Space Station.

Physician and statistician Hans Rosling (Karolinska Institute) and his son Ala Rosling jolted attendees’ preconceptions from the start with their
“fact-based worldview with animated data.” Founders of the Gapminder Foundation, which develops the Trendalyzer software system for visualization of
statistics, they took the audience through rapid-fire animated displays of world demographic trends. Much of what we think we know about world population
trends is wrong, they told us, and then demonstrated, first using an instant electronic feedback system to take the audiences’ answers to a series of
questions and compare them with reality.

Today half of the world’s population is in Asia and Africa, but by the year 2100 that figure will leap to 80 percent. “CEOs know this better than
academics,” said Hans, a bow to the practical value of modern demographic knowledge.

A dramatic new reality has set in. Whereas couples used to have on average six children of whom four died, the new balance is now two kids per couple, with
most of them surviving. This dramatic decline in babies born per woman is true of all religions and regions. Europe just started doing it earlier. As a
result world population will continue rising but not at the steep rate predicted three or four decades ago.

Max Maven, the mentalist and illusionist, gave both a lecture where he praised some deception (“art is a beautiful deception”) and later a
two-hour evening performance. Even our audience of skeptics found ourselves repeatedly mystified (but with no implication of paranormality), a good lesson
for everyone.

Kristine Hjustad (Norway), a medical student and PhD candidate (and also a performer of theatrical magic), performed knot-tying and other illusions to
demonstrate how we are fooled and how we interpret our perceptions, add meaning to them, and simplify them, usually without realizing it. “Our brain is in
control. It decides.”

Magician Tom Stone (Sweden) continued that theme. He showed and then patiently explained some of the psychological and perceptual principles behind
creating some illusions. “So now you won’t be fooled,” he added wryly. He then performed them again, and fooled everyone again.

Neuroscientist Beatrice Mautino of Italy’s CICAP skeptics group emphasized the value of solving mysteries to learn science (and vice versa). She said
skeptical investigation can kill three birds at once when it not only solves a mystery but explains some scientific facts (like the physics of firewalking)
. . . and then goes on to tell something about how science works. Hands-on activities are especially productive. CICAP takes people out to make their own
crop circles (they start with thirty-meter-diameter circles) or test “the blood of San Januarius” or lie on a bed of nails. As for assertions about an
Apollo landing hoax, she and her colleagues go through the evidence for that, and then ask people to investigate and test the claims themselves. This seems
to be an effective strategy.

Shane Greenup (Australia) reinforced that theme. Instead of telling people they are wrong, he urges leading them to question the belief using the Internet
to find the right information. And that right information could come via his Rbutr.comsoftware. You install Rbutr in your browser and it finds
rebuttals to extraordinary claims. Skeptics can establish a link from any web page making a claim to the rebuttals of their choice.

As journalistic organizations cut costs and staff, they do less real reporting. Michael “Marsh” Marshall (United Kingdom), who writes about the role of PR
in modern media, warned against a spreading practice he calls “churnalism”—printing press releases as news. A particularly popular new practice is
publishing what are essentially advertisements hidden as “research” based on online polls. Companies sponsor simple online polls, paying people to fill out
what he calls “B.S.” surveys filled with dodgy and leading questions and all calculated to lead to some favorable view about the particular business—say
preferences about travel or fashion. He has a “fourth paragraph rule”—if a company name appears around the fourth paragraph, there is a strong chance it
paid for the article. London’s tabloid Daily Mail, the biggest newspaper in Britain, is notorious for this, he said. It runs these paid surveys in
almost every issue. “They’ll put out anything to get attention.”

Psychologist Tomasz Witkowski (Poland), familiar to our readers from several recent pieces in SI, gave a nuanced talk addressing the question of whether
the social sciences are what Richard Feynman called a “cargo cult science.” Witkowski has his criticisms of social science—too much of it deals with
unimportant topics, and its surveys often use students and other biased samples. But he ultimately came down in defense of the social sciences, which he
said have great hidden potential. One example is the research that showed that adding a third brake light on the rear of vehicles would drastically reduce
accidents and injuries, or that emergency vehicles should be painted lime green to be most easily seen—practices, along with many advances in passenger
airline safety, that have now been widely adopted and save lives.

Dr. Catherine de Jong (Netherlands), an anesthesiologist, addiction researcher, and president of the Dutch Society Against Quackery, described
pseudoscientific addiction treatments that contradict treatments based on science. These questionable treatments include the Prometa protocol , disulfiram
injections, and Ibocaine. The latter is described as “a naturally occurring psychoactive substance found in plants in West Africa,” implying that since it
is natural it is safe. Ibocaine use carries a high risk of heart arrythmias and death, and it has been forbidden in the USA. Some of these addictions
treatments claim FDA approval (but any approvals are not for addiction treatment) or “almost 100 percent success” or offer a dubious hypothesis about the
working mechanism. Good science, better cooperation among health authorities, and investigative journalism all can help get rid of such pseudoscientific
treatments.

Anna Bäsén gave many examples of such investigative journalism. A medical reporter for a leading Swedish daily newspaper, she specializes in undercover
health journalism, going undercover to nursing homes or alternative medical practitioners (such as a health coach who claimed you can cure deadly viruses
with positive thinking) or psychics (she got a cold reading of “one of my not-real dead relatives”) and then simply reporting what they say. Undercover
medical journalism shouldn’t be used recklessly, Bäsén says, but “I also get upset when people get ripped off.” Her published exposés have put some of
these people out of business.

Science teacher Dénis Caroti (France) described teaching about intellectual self-delusion in France (where the word ”zetetics” rather than “skepticism” is
used to avoid the negative connotations of the latter). He touted physicist and CSI Fellow Henri Broch’s Laboratory of Zetetics at the University of Nice,
Sophia, where critical thinking is an official skill to be acquired by students.

On the final morning, Chris French (United Kingdom) gave a survey of anomalistic psychology (also the title of his forthcoming book), Hayley Stevens
(United Kingdom) described some of her experiences as a skeptical ghost hunter, and I ended the conference with a talk on “Why We Do This: The Higher
Values of Skeptical Inquiry” (to be published in the November/December 2013 Skeptical Inquirer).

There was more, a lot more, but you get the idea. For three days in Stockholm science and skepticism were
the
central theme of stimulating intellectual discussion and exchange. Young skeptics were everywhere and lent vigor and freshness. And until there is a Nobel
Prize in science-based skepticism or a distinguished skeptic makes it onto some nation’s currency, that will just have to do.

]]>Failure to Replicate Results of Bem Parapsychology Experiments Published by Same JournalMon, 15 Jul 2013 08:42:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/failure_to_replicate_results_of_bem_parapsychology_experiments_published_by
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/failure_to_replicate_results_of_bem_parapsychology_experiments_published_by
Two years ago the prepublication re­lease of a research paper by psychologist Daryl Bem claiming experimental evidence for precognition created a worldwide
media stir and intense controversy within the scientific and skeptical communities.

Bem, of Cornell University, claimed that through nine experiments he had demonstrated the existence of precognition, specifically the existence of
“conscious cognitive awareness . . . of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process.” Essentially, he had
claimed to have produced evidence that psychic abilities not only exist but can transcend time and allow the future to reach backward to change the past.

Informed critics of parapsychology were almost uniformly incredulous. Although Bem is a respected psychologist, they found so many flaws in the research
protocols and methods that in their view the conclusions had no validity. One of the most stinging re­bukes came in the form of an ex­tended, in-depth
critique of all nine experiments by York University psychologist and CSI Executive Council member James Alcock in the Skeptical Inquirer (“Back from the
Future: Parapsy­chology and the Bem Affair,” SI, March/April 2011; see also editorial “Why the Bem Experiments are Not Parapsychology’s Next Big Thing” in
the same issue).

Alcock also concluded that the journal that published Bem’s study, the Journal of Personality and Social Psy­chology (JPSP), had done everyone a
disservice by publishing this “badly flawed research article.” Parapsy­chology and the journal’s own reputation, he wrote, had been damaged, and the
article’s publication disserved the public as well, “for it only adds to [public] confusion about the existence of psi.”

Experiments attempting to replicate Bem’s results were quickly conducted at various universities, but none were accepted for publication by JPSP. In fact,
it said it would not consider publishing replication failures. This fact raised more controversy and concern.

Now the journal has had an apparent change of heart. It has finally published a set of experiments that attempted (and failed) to replicate Bem’s results.
Seven experiments conducted by Jeff Galek of Carnegie Mellon University, Robyn A. LeBoeuf of the University of Florida, Leif D. Nelson of the Uni­versity
of California at Berkeley, and Joseph P. Simmons of the University of Pennsylvania have been published in JPSP’s final issue of 2012 (Vol. 103, No. 6)
under the title “Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi.”

The article is lengthy, but the central conclusion is succinctly stated:

“Across seven experiments (N= 3,289), we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive
facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding.” They further conducted a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of the Bem experiments
“and find that the average effect size (d=0.04) is not different from 0.”

To put it even more directly (from the beginning of their conclusions section): “We conducted seven experiments testing for precognition and found no
evidence supporting its existence.”

How can their results be reconciled with Bem’s? “It is unclear how Bem could find significant support for a hypothesis that appears to be untrue,” the
authors say. They suggest such possibilities as what psychologists call Type I error—a false rejection of the null hypothesis. They also point to concerns
about researcher degrees of freedom, which also raise the likelihood of falsely rejecting the null hy­pothesis. While many experimental decisions are
defensible, “because their application is at the discretion of the researcher examining data after the completion of the experiment, they can make a true
effect more difficult to discern. . . . Researcher degrees of freedom do not make a finding false . . . but they do make it much harder to distinguish
between truth and falseness in reported data.”

They end by quoting philosopher of science Karl Popper: “An effect is not an effect unless it is replicable, and a science is not a science unless it
conducts (and values) attempted replications.” They do compliment Bem for encouraging the independent replication of his experiments.

Alcock, who wrote SI’s 2011 critique, has mixed feelings about the Galek et al. paper:

While I am happy that they carried out this research and that it was published, I find it very odd that they focused on Bem’s studies as though they had
been carefully de­signed and well-executed. They were so poorly designed and so badly executed that the results do not merit the careful consideration that
this research gives them. However, the experiments that Galek address, #8 and #9, were the best of a bad lot. Nonetheless, I am glad that they have done
this research and that it is in print. It counters Bem’s claims very nicely, without ruffling any feathers I guess.

Ray Hyman, professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Ore­gon and also a CSI Executive Coun­cil member, is another longtime expert on such
research. Here is his initial comment:

The number and size of their experiments, the detailed analyses, along with their inclusion of several other studies which fail to replicate Bem, deprive
the parapsychologists of their standard excuses for dismissing failed replications. Bem and his supporters have one other excuse they can use. They can,
and will, point to ways in which the Galak et al. experiments differ from Bem’s experimental protocol. The authors have anticipated this and have adhered
so closely to Bem’s protocol, that whatever differences remain appear trivial.

Publication by JPSP of the Galek et al. paper may or may not bring to end this latest dramatic claim of scientific evidence of the paranormal, but—combined
with the previous critiques—it appears to have dealt a serious blow. As Alcock emphasized in his 2011 critique (and as Hyman has often also stressed), over
the past eighty-odd years this kind of drama has played out multiple times, and “each time parapsychologists ultimately failed to persuade the scientific
world that parapsychological phenomena (psi) really exist.”

NOTE: CSICon3 is only 3 months away! Join us for CSICon3 October 24-27, 2013, part of the CFI Summit, a joint conference with CSI’s
sister organizations, the Center for Inquiry and the Council for Secular Humanism. Find out more at cfisummit.org.

Our CSICOP group (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry) originated the skeptics’ conference. So it was refreshing when, after a multiyear hiatus, CSI
got back into the conference scene in October 2011 with its CSICon conference in New Orleans. That proved a fun intellectual idea fest (see reports in our
March/April 2012 issue). It was good to be back. For the 2012 conference (October 25–28), CSI moved the CSICon site north to Nashville, another lively
location, and the talks, symposia, and surrounding events garnered generally great reviews from participants.

The irrepressible Richard Wiseman, the U.K. psychologist and CSI Fellow, emceed throughout the conference with his usual effervescent wit. Many speakers
were CSI Fellows; all were knowledgeable experts. Chief conference organizer and CSI Executive Director Barry Karr didn’t speak but was everywhere in
evidence. The Halloween party again was a big hit. There was a midnight séance to call up Houdini (he didn’t show). The whole thing concluded on Sunday
with a lively first-ever full-audience interactive discussion with members of the CSI Executive Council.

CSI dedicated the conference to our founder and former longtime chairman, the philosopher Paul Kurtz. Kurtz died the weekend before at the age of
eighty-six (see our January/February 2013 issue for tributes). In the opening remarks, committee CEO and President Ronald A. Lindsay and I, representing
Skeptical Inquirer and the CSI Executive Council, lauded Kurtz’s powerful legacy in creating the modern skeptical movement. Many speakers over the next
days likewise remarked on Kurtz’s key role in creating the first organized movement to advance critical inquiry, the scientific attitude, and informed
scientific criticism of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims.

All conference photos by Brian Engler

A live-audience two-hour taping of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast followed. The Novella clan (Steven, Bob, and Jay), Rebecca Watson,
and Evan Bernstein showed why their weekly science-and-skepticism show is so popular. George Hrab then entertained with his unique combination of guitar
and skeptical wit.

(All this was preceded by two preconference workshops, one by the Skepchicks applying skepticism to everyday nonsense, one on conducting investigations.)

The conference was off to a fine start. I was able to hear most sessions (I missed a couple of individual speakers). Some highlights I found memorable
follow.

Biologist P.Z. Myers is most known for his outspoken attacks on religion, but at CSICon for the second year in a row, he surprised many by giving a
straight science talk. The first part dealt with differing rates of evolution. “Selection works best in very large populations with a low mutation rate,”
he said. “Small populations with a high mutation rate are dominated by chance.” Lest we think humans are numerous in biological terms, he quickly
disabused. Humans have “a small population,” about 73109. In contrast Pelagibacter, which make up half of all bacterial
plankton in the ocean in summer, number about 231028. “So in humans, selection is not the prime pressure for change.”

Recent research into the gorilla genome shows, to the surprise of some, that “in 30 percent of the genome gorillas are closer to humans or chimpanzees than
the latter are to each other.” He then described how that agrees with calculations in what’s called coalescent theory, a population genetics model for
tracing genes back to common ancestors. The anti-evolution Discovery Institute, Myers said, claims that the gorilla genome research messes up the human
genetics connections to the great apes. “That’s hilarious,” Myers said. “These people don’t have a goddamned clue about evolutionary biology. They are dead
wrong.”

Psychologist James Alcock led off a session on Belief and Memory with a survey about belief, noting that beliefs are a dynamic production and can be
produced very quickly. Some beliefs are based on reason and carefully assembled evidence, but many are based on social constructions (we rely on the
perceptions and reactions of others we trust) and feeling. The “feeling of knowing” is an emotion and is not tied to knowledge and may have nothing to do
with reality. As for belief and disbelief, assessment is a two-stage process. We automatically believe new information before we assess it. Judging it
comes later, if at all. The brain processes content information and veracity information separately. He revisited “The Belief Engine” he wrote about in SI
many years ago (“we are a belief-generating engine”) and ended by emphasizing again that some beliefs correlate with reality, and some do not.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus noted that beliefs can begin to feel like memories, “then we have false memories.” She described some of her and colleagues’
ground-breaking experiments demonstrating that beliefs can be implanted. She also gave examples of prominent political figures recalling false memories,
noting, “no one is protected from having false memories.” She also emphasized the notorious unreliability of eyewitness testimony, noting the Innocence
Project has used DNA evidence to overturn 225 wrongful convictions, “most based on faulty memories.” She facetiously proposed that the oath administered
to witnesses testifying should be changed to: “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, or whatever you think you remember?”

Neuroscientist Indre Viskontas praised the value of storytelling as a memory aid (“to remember details of a past event make them part of a great story”)
but noted that remembering is a reconstructive process and remembering is often the functional equivalent of imagining.

In “Is Paul Dead?” investigator Massimo Polidoro gave one of the most entertaining talks, a multimedia feast of imagery and music and sounds playfully
exploring the persistent idea that Paul McCartney of the Beatles is dead. “What is going on here?” Polidoro asked. “There’s no evidence of a preplanned
hoax. . . . You start with an idea, and you look for proof. It can be anything. And it always works.”

Another hilarious session featured Richard Wiseman, Jon Ronson (author of The Men Who Stare at Goats, made into the movie with George Cooney), and
Rebecca Watson recounting their CSI “Paranormal Road Trip.” In this journey earlier that week by car from CSI headquarters in Amherst, New York, to the
Nashville conference site looking for “paranormal” adventures they encountered a lot of “haunted houses” but nothing paranormal. Wiseman did find himself
gobsmacked during a visit to the underground lair in Kentucky of a leading collector of magic memorabilia (“a cave full of magic”). There, neatly shelved
eighty feet underground, he found one of only fifteen first editions of a 1902 book, The Expert at the Card Table, by someone known only by the
pseudonym S.W. Erdnase. The book was far ahead of its time, said Wiseman, “the best sleight of hand ever.” “We still don’t know who wrote that book,”
Wiseman said. “It is a real mystery.” The group’s planned visit to the Creation Museum in Kentucky didn’t happen. Recounted Watson: “They said yes, you can
film. But you can’t make fun of us. We ended up skipping it.”

That evening, at the CSI Halloween Party, Wiseman was presented his earlier-announced CSI Balles Annual Prize in Critical Thinking (SI, September/October 2012), for the best skeptical book of the year, Paranormality: Why We See What Isn’t There. On first thought the CSI Halloween
Party might seem a strange venue for awarding Wiseman his prize. But maybe it all does fit. He seemed to relish it.

Sara Mayhew, the writer/illustrator of Manga-style graphic novels (see her cover article in the March/April 2012 Skeptical Inquirer) gave another
entertaining talk, illustrated with her drawings. “I want to create a fandom-type feeling for skeptics and scientist heroes,” she said. She noted that
these comic versions of anime are a multimillion-dollar art form with a high female readership, about 70 percent in the U.S. “Good role models present a
variety of different people. Manga does that. Having more female role models is good for young men and males as well.” She said one can apply the same goal
to science role models.

“My goal is to combine my love of science and critical thinking with this emotional art form for people to connect.” Like Indiana Jones (“a cool scientist
role model”) or the women in her stories, “We need more of these epic stories,” but instead of “faith” and “believe” as themes, seen too often in other
epics, “we can have a message of, ‘How do we know about the world?’ in an honest way. We need heroes who think their way out of crises, who care about the
truth.”

With two strong statements—“Just because you call something science doesn’t make it so” and “There is no scientific evidence against evolution,” Eugenie C.
Scott of the National Center for Science Education began her report on the current status of evolution-creation disputes. At their root is that
creationists mistakenly believe that “evidence against evolution equals evidence for creation,” thus their continual attacks on evolution and their
evolving strategies for undermining its teaching.

Statehouse legislatures are a prime target. About forty “Evidence Against Evolution” bills, also called “academic freedom” bills, exist in various stages.
Two have passed, in Louisiana and Tennessee.

Creationists are masters at distorting the meaning of words. “If you see ‘balanced’ and ‘evolution’ on the same page, you know you are looking at a
creationist document.” Other euphemisms to look out for are “full range of views” and “teach the controversy.” Says Scott: “To miseducate young learners
does them no favors.”

Most all these latest bills avoid mentioning religion, stress free speech, advocate teacher protection if teaching “alternatives” to evolution, and use
permissive language (“allow” not “require”). “They are very clever the way they set up these bills.”

What to do? Inform yourself, pay attention to your legislature and state and local school boards, and support good science standards and teaching. As for
the court cases so far, the news is good: “One hundred percent of the case law has been in favor of evolution.”

A symposium on science and public policy was actually an update and elaboration of a controversy played out in recent issues of the Skeptical Inquirer:
social science research into political beliefs as described in SI contributing editor Chris Mooney’s 2012 book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality, his SI article “Why the GOP Distrusts Science,” and the ensuing
controversy (letters in SI and Ronald A. Lindsay’s somewhat critical review of Mooney’s book in SI.) My introduction was a shorter form of what became my
editorial “Can We Have Civilized Conversations about Touchy Science Policy Issues” in our January/February 2013 issue.

Mooney, knowing he was much the target of the ensuing two talks, began by noting that he is a science journalist covering the research on the subject. “I’m
reporting on the research. So if you don’t like the conclusions, don’t blame me, blame the science.” He reiterated that those studies show that “there’s
something unique about Republicans’ view of science,” and it involves “not just denial of science” but “denial of reality.” He maintained that liberals
and conservatives “have different personalities.” Without even considering political content, key conservative traits are conscientiousness and order and
stability while a key liberal trait is openness to new experience and new ideas. These traits explain much about the different parties’ political views and
their attitudes toward science. In his view conservatives’ need for “cognitive closure” and a tendency toward authoritarian certainty and black-and-white
views is antithetical to scientific thinking.

Dan Kahan, a professor of law and of psychology at Yale University, was first up. The essential problem all are concerned about, he said, is “the failure
of valid and amply disseminated science to persuade.” He offered “one good explanation” and four “not so good” explanations.

The good explanation, said Kahan, is what he calls “identity-protective cognition.” It is simply this: “People have group allegiances that make them
interpret science findings in different ways.” Those ways consistently go in the direction of the values that protect their group identity. Other,
not-so-good explanations include science denial, misinformation, a rationality deficit, and authoritarian personality. Science denialism fails as an
explanation because views are divided along lines consistent with their group. People of each party “count someone as an expert when he has positions
consistent with their cultural outlook.” Both parties believe in being guided by a scientific consensus, “but they disagree on what that consensus is.”

Lindsay recounted the evidence he amassed in his SI review calling into question Mooney’s key conclusions. He concluded that one problem is that many of
the studies Mooney cited may actually not be measuring conservatism.

Unfortunately the session’s time ran out before Mooney could give any real response, other than to say that he disagreed with virtually all of Lindsay’s
criticisms. Nevertheless, after the session they were seen sitting at a table together in what seemed amiable conversation, so perhaps, in this setting at
least, the civility sought in the title of my SI editorial prevailed.

In his “The Science of Medicine” column in the November/December 2010 Skeptical Inquirer, Yale School of Medicine physician Steven Novella wrote tellingly
about “The Misunderstood Placebo,” and in his talk he returned to that topic.

The so-called placebo effect is a subjective-only effect, he said, not an objective one. It is manipulated by psychology only, not physiology. Most placebo
effects are illusory effects that depend upon belief in getting traction. As for the often-vaunted “mind-body” connection? “Well, yeah,” said Novella,
“because it’s the same option. What other option is there?” So-called “placebo medicine” exploits the confusion about placebos. It makes vague use of the
term “healing” and plays into the branding and marketing of “complementary and alternative medicine” (see sidebar about the pseudoscience in medical
schools). An example of the exploitation of placebo confusion is the often heard statement that “Acupuncture works—as a placebo.” That, said Novella,
“just means that the outcome was negative.” So what’s the harm? Extolling a placebo is “installing bizarre, unscientific, mystical, nonscientific beliefs
in patients.”

In case you didn’t know it, the world was supposed to end on December 21, 2012. The myth of an impeding apocalypse on that date—drawing on everything from
the Mayan calendar to supposed Sumerian or biblical predictions, to worries about comets or the nonexistent planet Nibiru, to pole shifts, planetary
alignments, and solar flares—infected credulous websites across the Internet and worried the hell out of a significant share of the world’s population (10
percent of Americans, according to a Reuters poll). Things got so bad that in the first week of December the Russian government put out an announcement
that the world would not end later that month, and in the United States NASA did much the same thing.

Come to think about it, as I write up these notes in mid December, it’s probably all for naught, but in the oft chance the world continues after the winter
solstice, I’ll continue. Planetary scientist David Morrison, as SI readers know, has been at the forefront of trying to rebut these rumors, providing
accurate scientific information through NASA’s “Ask an Astrobiologist” website, CSI’s website, and in articles and other forums. He spoke at CSICon
Nashville.

The whole thing would be silly and laughable except that Morrison gets pained messages from children so caught up in these beliefs that they tell him they
are contemplating suicide or killing their pets to spare them from the devastation.

Morrison recounted some of these messages and the “conflation of a variety of threads” of non-fact-based belief about all of it.

“None of these ‘facts’ is true,” he emphasized. “No scientist supports any of these claims. None of these stories is covered in newspapers or TV.” It has
been almost entirely an Internet phenomenon.

As for a supposed galactic alignment, “I don’t know what an alignment is. It’s not a term used by astronomers. There is no alignment in December. There is
no core of fact to this. These things are not going to happen.”

Says Morrison: “It’s all part of a mindset that believes in prophecy.”

Morrison labels this new outlook “Cosmophobia—the fear of the end of the universe.” People who believe it are getting all their “information” on YouTube
and elsewhere on the Internet. The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that “science shows on cable TV have gotten a lot worse.” Assuming short
attention spans, the trend now, even on mainstream channels, is to be “hyper-exciting,” with explosions, impacts, and so on every ninety seconds.

The conspiracy meme doesn’t help, says Morrison. “People afraid of the government in one area have spread it to every topic.”

Sharon Hill, using lively illustrations, spoke on “How to Think about Weird News.” Hill, a geologist by training, does the Doubtful News blog and
writes a column on CSI’s website called “Sounds Science-y.” (An SI article on that subject by Hill appeared in our March/April 2012 issue.)

“I’m a ‘weird news’ junky,” she said. “Weird news is my favorite conversation topic.” Weird news makes for a good story, she says: “Mystery is mongered.
The wow factor is stressed. . . . TV and entertainment is our new misinformation highway.”

She considers the main audience for her Doubtful News site “the critical thinking community.” The topics she examines are endless, the sources pitiful:
“Real things entwined with wrongness.” Videos are hoaxed, birds fall from the sky, strange sounds are heard, dead carcasses of normal animals are claimed
to be demonoids or monsters. She has a whole category called “underwater mysteries.” Then there are the quack cancer cures, always a problem for
science-minded skeptics (“There is almost no way to write about them without sounding heartless”), bogus consumer products, and emotional appeals. You’d
think it’d all tire Hill out. But she’s still enthusiastic. “I’m pretty dedicated to not missing something good.”

Scott O. Lilienfeld had the “honor” of being the conference’s final speaker, but he performed his task so well no one’s interest wavered. “It has been an
amazing conference,” he said. He dedicated his talk to CSI founder Paul Kurtz, who, Lilienfeld observed, “was always respectful and gentlemanly.”

Lilienfeld, a psychologist and member of the CSI Executive Council, spoke on “The Great Myths of Popular Psychology.” He noted that “even for our brightest
students, it’s a confusing world out there.” The pop psychology industry perpetuates myths, and no one is immune. For instance, 77 percent of his students
begin by believing that schizophrenics have “multiple personalities,” 63 percent think memory is like a video camera, 47 percent say memories don’t change,
and 61 percent think hypnosis is useful in solving crimes. This “naïve realism—the belief that the world is exactly as we see it”—is exemplified by the
belief that eyewitness observation is always correct and in the often-heard (and often exactly wrong) phrases “seeing is believing” and “I know what I
saw.”

Lilienfeld ranged over a variety of examples of selective perception and memory, including illusory correlations (such as the repeatedly debunked idea that
psychiatric admissions increase during the full moon) where “our brains are making the correlation.” He ended by bringing up the troubling implications of
some recent research. Debunking can be effective, these studies show, but it can also have backfire effects, reinforcing beliefs instead of disabusing
people of them. “We need more than debunking; we need alternative accounts. . . . Spend more time telling what’s true, not what’s false.”

Economic Fraud: How Cons and Criminals Scam the Public

“What harm does it do?” That is the perennial challenge hurled at skeptics. What harm is there in people credulously believing in things that aren’t true,
that are too good to be true? When it comes to economic fraud crimes, the harm is self-evident. Money is lost, lots of it. Sometimes one’s life savings,
sometimes entire fortunes.

Psychologist Anthony Pratkanis, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, is deeply involved in this issue, and he gave a powerful presentation on the
weapons of fraud—how cons and criminals scam the public. Americans alone lose $40 billion a year in telemarketing fraud, $110 billion in fraud generally.
Worldwide, the totals are staggering.

There is no evidence for the myth of the weak victim. The weak and the strong are taken. And the evidence indicates that seniors are less
susceptible, not more; they are just targeted more. Victims are more likely to have experienced a negative life event. And contrary to what you might
expect, victims are more, not less, financially literate. They think they are immune. That makes everyone susceptible.

Social influence is the weapon in fraud crimes, Pratkanis emphasized.

He showed parts of a training video, “Weapons of Fraud,” detailing how scam artists tailor their pitch to what makes you vulnerable. (“It’s like cold
reading.”) They keep and share records of phone conversations. They use such weapons as phantom fixation (something you would like that is completely
unavailable), social proof (“other people are winning”), false scarcity (about this rare 1860 coin, “There are only four left in the world”), authority,
reciprocity, and a whole litany of others.

Can we stop it? Pratkanis described a project he and his psychologist colleagues have been working on with the FBI and other law enforcement authorities.
It is called Santa Monica’s Reverse Boiler Room. It involves identifying victims before the con is completed, calling them, and warning them. The reverse
call center sends out prevention messages, giving people a coping strategy.

Ethical safeguards have been put in place, and the FBI is on-site to monitor. Victims are debriefed.

Does it work? “It has cut the victimization rate in half,” says Pratkanis. “This is the first demonstration of an effective deterrent to this crime. . . .
Forewarning works.”

As a scientist, Pratkanis says he finds this work “exhilarating.” But as a human being, “I got depressed. We can see how it [scamming] works. Yet it keeps
going on and on.”

‘Quackademic Medicine’: Teaching Pseudoscience in Medical Schools

A problem of serious concern to skeptics these days is the rapid perfusion of pseudoscience into medical schools. This practice is eagerly promoted by
proponents of so-called alternative medicine and increasingly allowed by a medical education culture not alert to what’s at stake.

Prominent physicians in the skeptical movement brought the practice into the spotlight in a major CSICon symposium on the problem.

One good label for the infiltration of pseudoscience into medical schools is “Quackademic Medicine,” a term coined by physician Robert W. Donnell. In the
CSI symposium, cancer surgeon David Gorski, who edits the Science-Based Medicine website, used that term approvingly. He noted that quackery has undergone
a linguistic evolution, a “ major rebranding of quackery.” What forty years ago was properly called “unscientific medicine” began to be called, in the
1970s and 1980s, “alternative medicine.” (He considers that simply “unproven” and “often, disproven” practices.) “Complementary and Alternative
Medicine” (CAM) came along in the 1990s, and now there is another rebranding: “Integrative Medicine.” Gorski’s succinct take? “Integrative
medicine=science+magic.”

Major medical schools like the University of Maryland and Georgetown have been integrating CAM throughout their curriculum and even into basic science
courses. This has proven popular. “Bioenergetic medicine” is another new term, allowing the teaching of such nonscientific concepts as a “vital force” and
“qi.”

“This is the foot in the door . . . like the Trojan Horse,” said Gorski. Harvard, Michigan, and the Cleveland Clinic are all welcoming these intrusions
of questionable medical concepts into their curricula.

Often the cry is heard to “treat the whole patient.” “This pisses me off,” said Gorski. “That’s what doctors already do,” he notes. “And it creates a false
dichotomy: You don’t need to use quackery to ‘treat the whole patient.’”

He and other concerned physicians see an increasing hostility toward science-based medicine. One commentator even has called evidence-based healthcare
“microfascism.”

Contributing to the problem is the relative indifference of most physicians, what Gorski refers to as a “shruggie,” a person who doesn’t care. “Most
doctors just don’t care.”

“SkepDoc” Harriet Hall, a frequent SI contributor, said what’s happening in medical schools is a reflection of what’s happening in society overall. The
view is, in short, “We don’t need no stinkin’ intellectuals” and “We don’t need no education—we have Google.” Other factors include the ideas that positive
thinking makes it so and “my facts are as good as any others,” a distrust for authority, looking for an easy solution, postmodernism (truth is relative),
and a rising acceptability of doctor-bashing.

She told the story of a retired physician who took up acupuncture and soon found it working on everything. Wrote this doctor: “There is nothing like
personal experience to convince one of an effect.” Hall noted that he made a litany of common mistakes: confirmation bias, using biased sources, not
recognizing how charisma can influence your view, cherry-picking the data, not understanding why science is necessary, relying on personal experience, the
cause-effect fallacy, the ancient wisdom fallacy, and relying on the personal experience of others. “The plural of anecdote is not evidence,” Hall
commented. She lamented that critical thinking is not taught in medical schools.

Kimball Atwood, another frequent contributor to SI and to Science-Based Medicine, reiterated Gorski’s view that misleading language contributes to giving
nonscientific and pseudoscientific medical practices a free pass. Terms such as “allopathic,” “holistic,” “complementary,” “alternative,” “integrative,”
and “Western” all mislead.

Atwood raised a reasonable question: “Why discuss implausible claims at all?” He believes medical schools should teach scientific skepticism. There are
also important lessons in the history of medicine that can be taught, like the downfall of bloodletting and the “pre-scientific practices” that persist
today, such as homeopathy, where teaching about Avogadro’s number could help students understand homeopathy’s innate implausibility. Skepticism, with its
emphasis on logical fallacies and its insistence that clear thinking should trump pseudoscience, has great value.

As for worries that it may be impolite or impolitic to raise such issues, Atwood said, “Clear thinking should not be sacrificed on the altar of
politeness.”

It is a question of medical ethics, he emphasized: “Implausible treatments are unethical. Deceptive placebos are unethical. And human studies of highly
implausible claims are unethical.”

Eugenie C. Scott was the only non-physician who spoke. As executive director of the National Center for Science Education (and a physical anthropologist)
she has great concerns about allowing more and more pseudoscience into medical schools. “It will miseducate students,” she said. As for academic freedom,
that is important, she noted, because it allows teachers to teach unpopular ideas and to challenge students. But there is also “academic judgment,” she
insisted.

“The issues are quite profound.”

The Skeptical Inquirer plans a future article on how nonscientific concepts are making their way into the education of physicians. —K.F.

Gender Issues in Science: What’s Different, What’s Not?

Gender issues continue to gain attention and generate controversy. Good science, critical inquiry, and clear thinking all can help illuminate, not
exacerbate, the issues. A morning session on gender issues explored the degree to which psychological differences between the sexes exist and to what
degree they are hardwired or the result of culture.

Richard Lippa of California State University, Fullerton, offered a thoughtful examination of Janet Hyde’s argument that there are not that many
differences. He first looked at psychological differences. In the dimensions of agreeableness and neuroticism, women tend to be more highly represented. In
the domain of mental illness, males tend to have such disorders as autism, mental retardation, reading disorders, and Tourette’s syndrome, while women
experience more depression by a 2:1 ratio and also tend to have more bipolar, panic, and conversion disorders. Among personality disorders, males tend much
more than females to be antisocial or sociopaths. “So there are big differences in psychology,” he said.

As for overall intelligence, any differences are small. One area where differences are big is along the people-things dimension. Men tend always
to be more interested in things-oriented occupations, women in people-oriented occupations, and studies show that holds true over fifty-three nations. As
for social behaviors, men tend to be more aggressive (10:1 male:female ratio of murderers).

Overall, between men and women, he said studies show that some differences are small, some differences are moderate, and some differences are large.

Psychologist Carol Tavris (author of such books as The Mismeasure of Women) next took the stage. “That was a terrific talk,” she said of Lippa’s
presentation. “I have no differences with it. So I’m going to leave now!” The audience laughed. She proceeded.

She called for perspective (“either/or thinking is not going to get us anywhere”) and a sense of history. She noted that women have come a long way since 1960. She reiterated, “I completely
agree with Richard regarding psychological differences.” But she said many sex differences have flipped over in the past decade or two. “The problem is stereotypes.” She cautioned against “taking snapshots that assume differences at any time tell us about fundamental differences.” Another
caution is that in surveys “what people say has little to do with how they behave. . . . You don’t see the major differences when you
look at behavior.”

As an example, she said if you define aggression as “intention to harm,” you don’t see sex differences. “We just express it in different ways. . . . Women
are likely to ruminate more than men.” As for brain differences, there are indeed many anatomical and activity differences in men/women brains, but it all
comes down to “so what?” She pointed to three general problems with generalizing about brain differences: There is no correlation with behavior, brains are
complex, and each brain is unique.

What is the future of sex differences, and where are we going from here? Tavris summarized things this way. A lot in society is changing. It’s women who
are getting the educations. We are seeing huge differences in economic status. Women are now earning more, getting better educated, and getting better
jobs, so many are delaying marriage. “The whole planet is becoming Sweden,” is how she put it. Changes are being caused by the global economy and
circumstances.

A memorable moment came when a man in the audience concerned about how to think about gender differences asked Tavris for advice about raising his
daughter. She replied succinctly: “Enjoy the ones that matter, ignore the rest.” —K.F.

]]>CSICon New Orleans 2011 - Ideas and Analysis, Frauds and Fun: An Intellectual TreatFri, 22 Jun 2012 12:41:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/csicon_new_orleans_2011_-_ideas_and_analysis_frauds_and_fun_an_intellectual
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/csicon_new_orleans_2011_-_ideas_and_analysis_frauds_and_fun_an_intellectualThe Committee for Skeptical Inquiry held its CSICon New Orleans 2011 conference October 27–30 at the New Orleans Marriott. It was a welcome resumption, after an eight-year hiatus, of CSICOP conferences.

It featured a dozen symposia on everything from conspiracy theories and UFOs to evolution versus creationism and skepticism in the media; special talks by skeptical luminaries; an awards banquet; and a host of social and entertainment events. The latter included a “Smarti Gras” parade and New Orleans Halloween Party Saturday evening at a French Quarter bar after the special conference address by Bill Nye “The Science Guy.”

Like its earlier CSICOP conference predecessors, CSICon New Orleans 2011 was rich with provocative ideas, good science, critical thinking, informed analysis, and penetrating criticism of claims poorly supported by scientific evidence. It was also filled with fun social events that allowed plenty of opportunity for interactions with fellow skeptics and to enjoy the camaraderie shared by those who defend good science and expose shams, frauds, and unsupported claims.

It began on a Thursday afternoon with opening remarks by Center for Inquiry President Ronald A. Lindsay, CSI Executive Director Barry Karr, and me, and ended on Sunday afternoon with a “Houdini Séance” conducted by Joe Nickell, Ray Hyman, and Massimo Polidoro. The sessions provided quite an intellectual feast for science-minded skeptics of every stripe.

Some of the many highlights for me included:

• Bill Nye “The Science Guy’s” special conference address, informative and in­spiring. He provided a cosmic perspective on human curiosity and exploration and a sterling defense of the need for good science and math education for a science-literate citizenry. He ended with a backlit photo from the Cassini mission of a close-up Saturn seen from outside its orbit inward, the planet Earth a tiny dot barely visible through its rings.

• Chemistry Nobel laureate (and CSI Fellow) Sir Harry Kroto’s talk “Educa­tion as the New Dark Age Ap­proaches.” It excoriated parents who allow their religions to teach hatred toward others religions, lamented the rise of ideological-oriented nonsense (rather than common sense), and extolled natural philosophy (“the only philosophy we have devised to determine the truth with any degree of reality”). Kroto also called for more recognition of “true heroes” (those from the world of science, like Einstein, Darwin, Chandrasekhar, Maxwell, and Rosa­lind Franklin) and emphasized the importance of learning algebra and calculus (“the universe doesn’t speak any other language”).

• Chris Mooney’s talk (in a session on science and public policy) on the science of denial. He emphasized (as we have reported several other times recently) that corrections don’t change people’s false beliefs; in fact, they cause people to hold them all the more strongly, “doubling down” on them. Studies of “motivated reasoning,” the updated view of cognitive dissonance, show that we are not conscious of the vast majority of what our brains are doing and that our emotional reactions drive our memory retrieval. “By the time we are conscious of it we are defending ourselves—acting like law­yers.... This is how people work. We spin out all of the old rationalizations ... and create new ones.” And then there’s what he called the “smart idiot” effect, in which people who know more are more capable of showing bias and more skilled at coming up with arguments to defend their biased views. Thus things always polarize, a situation we now find endemic in political discourse.

• Indre Viskontas (neuroscientist and TV’s Miracle Detectives scientist; see the interview with her in our Novem­ber/December 2011 issue) on why we love stories and on using narratives to promote science. Why stories? Because we find them compelling. Stories or testimonials usually trump dry statistics because they are more easily remembered than facts. Likewise, stories become personal. Storytelling thus is a powerful tool for any message, including that of science and skepticism. In her role on the show, Viskontas says, “My job is to reframe the [claimed miracle] event in a way compatible with science. Some people might call me a skeptic.”

• Biologist and famed blogger PZ Myers’s passionate paean to the power of narrative storytelling (in stated strong agreement with Vis­kontas). Myers’s Myth Number One is that we “people of reason” are “soulless robots who don’t know how to communicate.” He rattled off a long list of scientist-atheists who are first-rate scientists and communicators. “This is a golden age of science writing,” he said. His Myth Number Two: “If you are credible or gullible you are so much better at stories.” The Bible, often extolled by even skeptics as at least full of good stories, got no praise from Myers. “Genesis is crap. It’s crazy town.... There was no global flood. This story makes no sense.” As for those who give it a pass by saying that Genesis is just a metaphor, he said, “Tell that to the people at Answers in Genesis.” Said Myers, “Our side has the good story,” and it has both truth and beauty, two values often ignored. He provided a sample story, a fossil find showing a mammoth bone carefully (and lovingly?) placed in the mouth of a fossil dog, “the best present you could give a dog” and a strong clue that “dogs have been our partners for thousands of years.” Another compelling story is that around 50,000 to 70,000 years ago a catastrophe of some sort reduced the entire world’s population to only about 1,200 people, including only about 500 in Africa. “We were close to extinction.... This is the story that science can tell you. It is underappreciated.” As he said, “Our stories are not only beautiful, they are true.”

• Investigator Massimo Polidoro’s “A Recipe for Testing Psychics” and his five rules: 1. Exactly define a claim (in writing). 2. Agree on a shared protocol. 3. Have the psychic perform a demonstration (which should be 100 percent successful, since there are no controls). 4. Add the control. 5. See what happens ... “and wait for the excuses.” In his twenty years experience, “only once has a person admitted [they were] wrong.”

• Physician Paul Offit’s stirring advocacy of vaccinations and condemnation of anti-vaccination campaigns, which undermine public health and endanger others. Offit, author of Deadly Choices: How the Anti-Vaccine Movement Threat­ens Us All, said a lot of progress is being made, pointing out how the media came down hard on would-be presidential candidate Michele Bach­mann when she made an outlandish claim about the HPV vaccine, which can prevent cervical cancer. At his hospital in Phila­delphia, the flu vaccine is mandatory for all employees. He said the measles vaccine will get some public attention when unvaccinated people start dying of that disease.

• The symposium “Sleight of Mind” by neuroscientists Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde and science journalist Sandra Blakeslee (coauthors of a recent book of the same title), plus James Randi on the neuroscience of magic. Macknik and Martinez-Conde have been studying how the world’s great magicians employ ancient principles that can now be explained using the latest discoveries of cognitive neuroscience. Illusions dissociate perception from reality and reflect what the brain is actually doing. The scientists described numerous cognitive illusions, demonstrated the power of manipulated awareness, and showed that different effects are due to different circuits of the brain. Randi, the hero of his fellow skeptics, worked with the authors in their studies and followed their joint talk with his own personal views on the subject. “Magicians have to be aware of how they themselves think,” he said, lamenting that “some magicians don’t know at base how their tricks work.” As for why he and other magicians don’t tell you how their tricks are done, he gave his stock answer: “I want you to leave here knowing that you can be deceived.” That is an invaluable lesson, he said. He called Macknik and Martinez-Conde pioneers in their field and “heroes” of his.

The X-Files’s William B. Davis presents on skepticism in the media. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

• The symposium on alternative medical claims featuring physician/skeptic luminaries Steven Novella, Har­riet Hall, and Edzard Ernst. Hall punctured the acu­puncture myth, including the widespread belief that acupuncture is an ancient practice (“current practices developed in the twentieth century”) and showing that sham acupuncture works just as well. Novella ardently advocated science-based medicine and described a litany of biases that contribute to self-deception among patients and practitioners as well. Physi­cians themselves are susceptible to such clinical pitfalls as pattern recognition, relying on personal experience, elevating experience over evidence, failing to consider alternatives, be­coming confused by nonspecific symptoms, and falling prey to confirmation bias (“I’ve seen it work”). Throw in problems with re­search such as publication bias, research bias, the decline effect, and the fact that preliminary studies are not as rigorous, and it is no wonder that, as medical re­searcher John Ionnidis has written, the majority of medical studies are wrong. Ernst has published a thousand papers in peer-reviewed journals, including 300 systematic reviews. “Many of these publications have disappointed en­thusiasts of alternative medicine,” he noted. “Some were outraged.” He and his colleagues have examined studies funded by NCCAM, the National Center for Comple­men­tary and Al­tern­ative Medi­cine, and (as did authors of our January/February 2012 cover article on the topic) found many highly questionable. Re­gard­ing their studies of chiropractic, he found “questionable whether such research is worthwhile.” Rigorous studies of “energy medicine” were negative, hardly surprising since they were testing “implausible treatments.” When Prince Charles, an advocate of alternative medicine, complained about Ernst to the chancellor of his university, Ernst lost most of his funding and team. Ernst defended himself successfully but at high cost. He said his work has “generated substantial bodies of evidence,” much of it undermining assertions of alternative medicine, and made him “some friends, lots of enemies.”

CSI’s Barry Karr gives welcoming remarks. (Photo: Brian D. Engler)

This is just a brief taste of the sessions that made CSICon New Orleans 2011 such a treat. There were also lively sessions on “The Investigators” (Joe Nickell, Massimo Polidoro, Karen Stollznow, and Ben Radford), “Death from the Skies” (Phil Plait, David Morrison, and Seth Shostak), “Science and Public Policy” (Chris Mooney and Ron Lindsay), “Feeling the Future” (Ray Hyman and James Alcock), “Evo­lu­tion and Creationism” (Eugenie Scott and Barbara Forrest), “Skepti­cism and the Media” (Indre Viskontas, San­dra Blake­slee, and William B. Davis), “Super­stitions and Hauntings” (Amar­deo Sarma, Stuart Vyse, and Joe Nickell), “UFO Claims” (Robert Sheaf­fer and James McGaha), “Con­spiracy Theories” (David Thomas, Robert Blaskiewicz, and Ted Goert­zel), “Inde­pendent In­vestigation Groups,” “Grass­roots Activ­ism and Outreach,” “Educating the Next Genera­tion,” and a characteristically mind-bending lunch talk about frontiers of modern physics by physicist Lawrence Krauss.

It was exhausting but exhilarating, and we can hope there will be many more CSICons to come.

Is the “Arab Spring” that is sweeping nations across northern Africa and the Middle East a liberating force for science and open inquiry?

The links among democracy, freedom, openness, and science were frequent themes at the recent World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar, as prominent scientists and science policy leaders spoke to 700 of the globe’s assembled science journalists.

“What happened in Egypt on January 25 has extended the geopolitical boundaries of Tahrir Square to every corner of the Arab world,” Mohammad Saoud, president of the Qatar Foundation, said in his welcoming words. He affirmed “strong support to what happened in Egypt” and its connections to “freedom throughout the whole Arab world.”

That the conference was being held in Qatar was a direct result of the events in Cairo. The 2011 conference was to have been in Cairo. Planning had been under way for two years by organizers in Egypt, the United States, and the Arab world. But the public uprising in January that ousted the Mubarek government and opened a new sense of freedom and possibility also created instabilities and uncertainties not resolved in time to ensure the conference could safely go ahead there. Qatar, a small, modern country on the Arabian Peninsula, and its well-funded Qatar Foundation, which supports science, education, and community development, offered the conference a home in Doha, its capital city. So the conference quickly gained a second home, and the long-sought goal of holding it for the first time in the Arab world was met. Journalists from ninety countries attended.

Arab nations are proud of the fact that Muslim and Arab scientists are credited with keeping alive learning and scholarship from the ninth through the twelfth centuries CE. The subsequent decline and loss of that role is painful to them. But in their view, something similar has begun to happen in the past fifteen years, as a burgeoning sense of possibility sweeps the more progressive parts of the Arab world. Renewed research programs are underway, said Saoud, to “regain some of what we offered the world.”

“There is no ceiling to our aspirations,” he said, referring to the foundation’s intention to bring to Qatar some of the best minds from all over the world. “We want to reverse the brain drain. We want to achieve a ‘brain gain’ in Qatar and across the Arab world.… We want to play a leading role in that Renaissance.”

In fact, the Qatar Foundation’s newspaper shortly before the conference headlined the goal bluntly: “QF Leads Drive to Revive Arab Golden Age of Science.”

Core to that purpose, Saoud said, is “the wisdom to support a genuine and sustainable research community.” The Foundation is pursuing a practical model based on attracting international partners from top institutions throughout the world. (Campuses of Carnegie Mellon and Georgetown Universities, located within sprawling modern multicomplexes of the Foundation outside of Doha, were sites of some conference social sessions. Four other U.S. universities also have campuses there.)

Saoud referred to quality of programs, students, environment, and facilities as key ingredients of a vision that is “bold and far-reaching.” He foresees having “20,000 scientists partnering with us or relocating to Qatar.”

“Diffusing access to science and technology will help people become responsible citizens,” Professor Abdelhamid El-Zoheiry of Egypt’s Ministry of Scientific Research and Technology told the conference attendees. Science is being liberated in Egypt, he said, referring to a new law being drafted there to encourage research. “The Arab Spring promises a gentle rain of change for science and technology.”

Egypt has its own science Nobel laureate. Egypt and the whole Arab scientific world are proud of Ahmad Zewail, who received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy. Zewail is the Linus Pauling chairman of chemistry at Caltech, from where he also serves on the President’s Council on Science and Technology. A member of the Qatar Foundation’s board, he was the conference’s opening keynote speaker. He is dedicated to the transfer to democracy in the Arab world.

He offered his own reflections on science and society. Science has witnessed revolutions, he said reeling off a list: visualizing and controlling matter at the level of atoms, deciphering the genetic codes, using stem cells to make new organisms, building precision labs to land on Mars. He noted our level of ignorance as well: “The amount of the unknown in [the] universe exceeds by far the known.” Ninety percent of the universe is “dark”; we don’t know how to unify the forces of nature, and we don’t understand what makes consciousness from atoms and molecules. “We have absolutely no idea.”

Challenges face the world of science and media, Zewail noted, including the rise of the infotainment culture. “Entertainment at the expense of education—it’s a serious problem.” He noted that five hundred television channels are now available in the Arab world. “Is this good for education? … Information doesn’t make useful knowledge. We need new knowledge.” He lamented sensationalism in the public media and that anything deemed bland or boring is expunged.

But he also spoke movingly of the burgeoning Arab Spring. He himself was involved in the Egyptian revolution. For four weeks he was there at the heart of it. “This revolution was unique in the history of mankind,” he said. All communications were through social networking; the media played a significant, positive role; and there was a change of perception of Arabs about the value of a “civil” uprising. “They want the country to be a better place.”

Zewail also insisted that Islam is not in conflict with progress. “One small group [is made up of] fanatics,” he said. Such fanatics “exist in all faiths.” Said Zewail: “There are Muslim fundamentalists. But you have fundamentalists in America too.”

Zewail said he sees “no physics”—nothing validly foundational—in calling what’s been happening a conflict of cultures. It is simpler than that: “People want liberty and good lives to live.”

“There is nothing fundamental in Islam against science…. Let’s go beyond the past and forge ahead to the future. Our focus should be on the future,” he advised.

Zewail’s native country of Egypt is establishing a new city of science and technology outside of Cairo. The goal is to affect basic knowledge. The new city was referred to multiple times at the conference. Zewail modestly noted that “they were kind enough to name it after me.”

“We are working hard to reclaim this glorious past,” Zewail assured the conference audience.

Whether the so-called Arab Spring fulfills all the promises that bring such a feeling of burgeoning hope to the Arab world’s scientists and thinkers is a question that will probably remain open for some time. But the aspirations are certainly there, and that is an essential start. The Western world and the Arab world together can benefit only if at least some of these high ambitions come to fruition.

This is the second of several reports by SKEPTICAL INQUIRER Editor Kendrick Frazier from the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar. The first dealt with conference subthemes of pseudoscience, mythbusting, and evolution.

]]>Skeptical Inquirer editor Kendrick Frazier reports from Doha, QatarThu, 30 Jun 2011 11:17:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/skeptical_inquirer_editor_kendrick_frazier_reports_from_doha_qatar
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/skeptical_inquirer_editor_kendrick_frazier_reports_from_doha_qatarThe first day of the World Conference of Science Journalists in Doha, Qatar, June 27–29, could at times have been mistaken for a classic skeptics conference.

That is not altogether surprising, considering that science journalists, as the intermediaries between scientists and the public, encounter the same kinds of public misunderstanding and misperceptions (plus outright distortions) about science and the natural world that skeptics combat.

More than 700 science journalists from ninety countries—half of them from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, an intentional push by the main U.S. and Arab science journalism professional organizations to encourage science journalists from developing countries—are meeting in a new sprawling university/academic/research complex of the Qatari Foundation on the outskirts of Doha to consider all the issues they encounter in their professional lives. Among them: dealing with contradictory medical studies, the burgeoning digital media forums and whether science bloggers are science journalists, bioethical issues, reporting about risks when perceptions of risk are distorted, ethical issues facing science reporters, secret science, managing the transitions of science magazines to the digital age, journalism in the age of denial, and on and on.

I participated in a first morning session on “Investigating Pseudoscience,” together with skeptics and science journalists from Russia (moderator Tatiana Puchigina and Alexander Sageev, who emphasized cases in which pseudoscience can be a criminal activity), Hungary (István Vágó, former head of the Hungarian skeptics group and a prominent Hungarian television host), and Argentina (freelancer and skeptic Alejandro Agostinelli). We all outlined some of the characteristics of pseudoscience and gave some of our experiences battling it, and then we answered questions from other journalists about how best to deal with pseudoscience.

That breakout session was followed by a related one in the afternoon bearing the intriguing title “Warriors Against Claptrap: Are Myth-Busters the New Generation of Civic Scientist?” New myth-busting groups and efforts are springing up all over. The session addressed such questions as, Should we all confront bad science? Will that create public skepticism or cynicism? That panel addressed the impact of some widely publicized myth-busting campaigns that have captured the public imagination. The popular U.S. television show MythBusters (which U.S. President Barack Obama recently appeared on) was just one of the forums described. Julia Wilson and Leonor Sierra of Sense About Science, a U.K. group that promotes public myth-busting by young people, headed that fascinating discussion along with science journalists Ylann Schemm of the Netherlands, Alaa Ibrahim of American University in Cairo, and Pallab Ghosh of the BBC in the United Kingdom. Wilson described an effort in which a group of young people in the United Kingdom decided to challenge companies’ claims about “de-toxing.” They asked what evidence supported the de-tox claims. When the companies had to admit they had none, the group publicized that fact (with transcripts of the responses) and gained wide attention. Veteran BBC science broadcaster Ghosh concluded with some good points of wisdom. Among them: Science journalists’ prime responsibility is to act in the interests of their audience, that sometimes one needs to brave and take on important stories, and that they have a role and responsibility to bust myths. He called it “kick-ass journalism.”

And that session was followed by a plenary on “Evolution and the Evolving World of Science Journalism.” Scientific American Editor Mariette DeChristina, representing the National Association of Science Writers, moderated a panel that included participants from South Africa, Argentina, and the United States. But the lead talk was by our Committee for Skeptical Inquiry colleague Eugenie C. Scott of the National Center for Science Education, who began by noting how the journalistic principle of “balance” can be a problem in reporting on evolution. As she says, fairness and balance applies to opinion. “It is not an opinion that the Earth goes around the sun…. It is not a matter of opinion that living things have ancient ancestors.” (The “balance” problem is well understood by science journalists, but it remains a serious issue in general journalism, in which non-expert reporters frequently feel they must give creationist views equal weight to the long accepted scientific facts of evolution.)

Scott is an anthropologist, not a science journalist, but she is widely respected by science journalists for her efforts in helping them deal responsibly with the evolution/creation issue.

She forthrightly condemned a case in 2009 in which a noted science magazine, the British weekly New Scientist, published a cover announcing in large print, “DARWIN WAS WRONG.” (The article itself was about horizontal gene transfer and, says Scott, wasn’t the real problem.)

“The New Scientist cover is simply wrong,” Scott bluntly told the assembled journalists. “This cover was extremely irresponsible.” She noted that just two days later opponents of evolution on the Texas Board of Education cited the cover as evidence that evolution is wrong. New Scientist Editor Roger Highfield lamely responded at the time that he knew creationists would probably “take it out of context,” hardly any surprise to Scott, who wondered why he then did it. “Cover the science,” she said, “but don’t make it easy for creationists to take it out of context.”

So in the Qatari Foundation’s cool, modern facilities (video camera booms roam overhead, live radio interview programs are underway down the hall) surrounded by the blazing hot desert winds of Doha, science and skepticism was a prominent early theme as this largest ever world conference of science journalists—and the first ever held in the Middle East—got underway.

]]>A World TreasureThu, 06 Jan 2011 20:08:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/a_world_treasure
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/a_world_treasurePerhaps surprising for such a towering intellect, Martin was a modest and unassuming man.

One day
back in 1974, when I was editor of Science
News in Washington,
DC, the mail brought a letter from Martin Gardner. I knew of him, of
course, as the “Mathematical Games” columnist in Scientific
American and as author
of the seminal work about pseudoscience and crackpots, Fads
and Fallacies in the Name of Science. I’d
had a copy of that fascinating book since a friend gave it to me as
a gift in graduate school. I loved it. Martin’s letter gently but firmly
criticized us for a series of three articles we had run over a period
of months dealing with some fringe science matters: Uri Geller, Kirlian
photography, and Transcendental Meditation. Readers had requested the
articles. This was the heyday of Geller’s then-rising popularity,
and Geller had some (naive) scientists vouching for his powers. The
other two subjects were likewise attracting a lot of media and popular
interest. We had done our best to treat them carefully and with some
skepticism, but except for the one on Geller, Martin didn’t think
we’d done a particularly good job and was worried we’d put
aside our usual scientific standards by writing about them at all.

I
wasn’t at all offended by his criticism; in fact, I welcomed it. I
wrote him back. I told him science writers and editors like me had few
resources for checking the validity of these kinds of claims. I told
him we needed people like him who had the necessary critical perspective
and information to help us. Some sort of group of scientific experts
was needed to give us that kind of help.

So
it was perhaps not surprising that in the spring of 1976 I found myself
covering for Science
News an unusual conference
on “The New Irrationalisms: Pseudoscience and Anti-Science” at
the brand new SUNY Buffalo campus, at which philosopher Paul Kurtz announced
the creation of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranormal. It was exactly what I had asked for. My
subsequent article for Science
News—our cover pictured
a small knight-like skeptic with only a sword of reason challenging
a giant multi-headed dragon of pseudoscience (May 29, 1976)—stimulated
more reader response than any other subject we had ever written about,
which told me that this was a rich topic meriting much further examination.
The nicest and most unexpected letter I received—I just now rediscovered
it in my archives of those early events—was from Martin Gardner. He
thanked me for the article, praised its accuracy, and called it a “wind
of fresh air, long overdue.”

One
year later I was an invited guest and speaker at the first meeting of
the CSICOP Executive Council, held at the old Biltmore Hotel in New
York City with Paul Kurtz, Ray Hyman, Phil Klass, and others including
Martin Gardner himself, to my delight. The next day I was asked to join
the organization as editor of its new magazine (then called The Zetetic,
renamed the Skeptical Inquirer the next year). So Martin Gardner was
not only my introduction to any kind of systematic skepticism and one
of my early encouragers, but he was also there when I actually joined
the effort.

Over
the ensuing three-plus decades, it was my—and our readers’—pleasure
to have Martin Gardner write regularly for SI. At first he wrote only
occasional short articles and reviews. When he retired his Scientific American column after thirty years, I wrote
and asked if he’d like to consider writing a regular column for SI
on pseudoscience and fringe science. I was delighted when he agreed.
Let’s give it a try, he answered, and see how it goes. That column
(“Notes of a Psi-Watcher,” which he and I later renamed “Notes
of a Fringe Watcher”) appeared in every issue of SI from Summer
1983 to January/February 2002. He recently resumed it on an irregular
basis, and his last one, mailed to me May 12, ten days before his death,
appears on page 10.

Martin
was an editor’s delight. His columns always arrived early, usually
weeks ahead of deadline. Sometimes he would check with me in advance
about a possible subject; more typically he just mailed in a new column,
surprising me with the topic. A new one’s arrival was always the high
point of my day. They were clear, concise, involving, revealing, knowledgeable,
relevant, and usually witty—the product of a lively, extraordinarily
well-informed, unique mind. His columns were substantive but at the
same time eminently readable. He typed them double-spaced on an electric
typewriter, and the newspaperman in him (which he had once been for
awhile after studying philosophy at the University of Chicago) carefully
corrected any typos or made short word changes with black ballpoint
pen. Also in the newspaper tradition, he revised sections by cutting
and pasting, which was always done impeccably. I seldom had to do any
real editing.

Over
the years his columns covered everyone from Russell Targ, Margaret Mead,
Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Koestler, Rupert Sheldrake, Marianne Williamson,
Jean Houston, Doug Henning, and Phillip Johnson to maverick Cornell
astronomer Tommy Gold (twice); and everything from James Randi’s Project
Alpha (his first SI topic) to weird water, fuzzy logic, reflexology,
urine therapy, psychic astronomy, the Klingon language, and the humorous
yet profound question of whether Adam and Eve had navels. Every few
years he would collect the SI columns, together with a few reviews
and essays published elsewhere, in a new book. The first were The New Age: Notes of a Fringe
Watcher and On the Wild Side. The latest three are Are Universes Thicker Than
Blackberries? (2003), The Jinn from Hyperspace (2008), and When
You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish (2009).

On
September 11, 2001 (yes, that same terrible day), I opened a letter
from Martin that I had dreaded receiving. His beloved wife, Charlotte,
had died earlier of a stroke, and he was getting two columns to me quickly
because he knew he would soon go into a depression over her loss and
be unable to write any more. And, besides, he was eighty-seven. “I’ve
had a long run,” he ended, “and doing the column has been a great
pleasure.” It was a sad day for all of us. But in 2005 I saw a new
book review he had published elsewhere, and I wrote and invited him
to once again write for SI if he felt he could. His first was a two-article
series on “The Memory Wars.” We published it in our January/February
and March/April 2006 issues. The first part appears in our latest SI
anthology, Science
Under Siege (Prometheus,
2009).

He
was prolific to the end. We had two columns from him during the production
of our March/April 2010 issue. So we published the shorter one (about
fatal sweat lodge guru James Arthur Ray) as his regular column and the
longer one (about Oprah Winfrey and her gullibility on pseudo-medical
matters) as an article.

Perhaps
surprising for such a towering intellect, Martin was a modest and unassuming
man. Kindly, I would say. Obviously highly intelligent and a supremely
clear thinker, he showed no sign of ego. A somewhat shy person, he never
attended conferences or spoke at public gatherings. Although this was
a disappointment to his myriad fans, I think he felt his time was better
spent doing his own kind of research, reading up on the latest claims
of nonsense and crackpottery and buffoonery, and giving his unique critical
perspective in clear, concise prose. But he was a wonderful correspondent.
Any letter to Martin drew an almost immediate typewritten response.
That was true of my experience, and I have heard the same from others.
His letters were always friendly, direct, relevant, useful, and concise.
He never wasted words. I have quite a collection of such short letters
from Martin and will always treasure them.

Martin
Gardner was—among many other things—a brilliant and essentially
self-taught intellectual who had the respect of the world’s greatest
scientists and academics. The grandfather of the modern skeptical movement,
he was an extraordinarily knowledgeable skeptic with a uniquely whimsical
and easily amused mind who never took himself over-seriously, a great
teacher through example of what skepticism and skeptical inquiry are
all about, a clear writer and thinker, a peerless critic of nonsense,
and a steadfast advocate of science and reason—in short, a national
treasure. No; make that a world treasure.